The Back to the Future trilogy is generally considered fun and awesome and grand and good for kids and adults, and that’s fine, but what if it’s actually an incredibly complicated storytelling device employing elements from ancient Greek rhetoric? That’s what the Lockhard Theory postulates.

The theory states that the entire trilogy is essentially a “chiasmus.” A chiasmus, from a Greek term meaning “shaped like the letter X,” means that the story is a reflection upon itself. Each beat of it in the beginning must reflect a beat at the same relative point towards the end.

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As this video from Netflix puts it, the entire story is a palindrome.

To create not just one film, but an entire trilogy of films that follows a chiasmatic pattern would be incredibly difficult. Though it may just be true.